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Thursday, March 14, 2013

Curmudgeon's Corner: The Best Blog Post Since We Beat Hitler (SK)

Welcome back our guest poster, Shawn Keenan! He is the author of two great books, The Intern's Tale and The Buried Covenant.

I’m noticing a new trend in our
culture, and most prominently, with the talking heads that squeeze themselves
into the rectangular shaped boxes in our living rooms, bedrooms, and above our
keyboards (fine, on our ipods, ipads, ibooks, and idontcares as well).
I’m not sure how to describe it with nuance or subtlety, so I’ll just pull a
page from one of their playbooks to tell you about it.

It’s the worst trend I’ve seen
since Hitler started making an entire race of people wear armbands to identify
themselves as genetically inferior across the face of Europe!

Ok, so did I overreach a little
there? I don’t care, because these commentators and faux-experts on
misplaced rage and incorrectly identified injustice use scare tactics and
propaganda to force their worldview on people the same way ….

I want to connect this to
writing in some meaningful way, even though the issue is indicative of a
problem that’s become pandemic throughout our entire society.

Let’s call it “The Hitler
Conversation Ender”.

Now, imagine that in your book
or story you were ready to introduce your villain, maybe in chapter three or
so. Let’s even make him a very straightforward villain, not a lot of
shades of grey (one or two at most, but, please, not fifty). Now let’s
write an opening scene for him.

Trevor Gluth was sitting in the
dermatologist’s waiting room, flipping lazily through a fourteen-month-old copy
of Field and Stream. His eyes
skimmed across the surface of the pages, never causing a ripple, never picking
up a word. With every turn of an unread page, Trevor stole a glance
across the room and absorbed a piece of Whitney Moon. The color of the
stitching running along the hem of her skirt, the way stray hairs fell over her
ears even though the rest of her hair was pulled taut behind her head, the way
the carotid artery on the left side of her neck rose and fell with the twist of
her head. Trevor looked back down and savored that last detail like a
burst of crepe filling in his mouth as he skimmed the next glossy page.
Just like Hitler would have.

So, were you starting to get
creeped out? At least a little? Hopefully you wanted to know the
connection, if any, between Trevor and Whitney. Maybe you wanted to know
why he was obsessing over her circulatory system. If you’re a guy reading
this, maybe you were curious about those Field
and Stream articles going unread. Whatever your interest in the
passage and the character, I’d bet my last Deutschmark I lost you as soon as I
jumped to Hitler. There’s a simple reason for that. Wait, there’s
actually an even more simple reason
for that. Nobody’s like Hitler.

Thank God.

I’m willing to concede there may
be people in the world today with minds as dark, as twisted as Hitler’s was,
but the world is a different place, filled with people determined never to let
someone like that commit global-scale atrocities again. Now, I’m sure this
basic argument could be countered by people with more social awareness than I
have, sighting genocide in dark corners of the globe that the mainstream media
is uninterested in shining much light on, but I think for the purposes of this
analysis, there is no one like Hitler.

Again, pretty glad about that.

So what does it do to your
argument, or your writing, when you jump straight from a double dare to a
triple dog dare in the form of a Fuhrer comparison? In my opinion, it
completely invalidates the most important character reference for the validity
of a person’s perspective: their judgment. I just don’t believe what
anybody has to say after they throw Hitler into the mix. Here’s my
logic: Comparing someone with whom you have a difference of opinion with to
Hitler is crazy. I don’t listen to cray-cray, ergo, I don’t listen to
you.

Lumping someone in with Hitler
seems to be the go-to argument ender these days. “If you agree with this
other person, you agree with Hitler, so now you have the blood of innocent
millions on your hands. So who’s right now?”

Well, no one can argue with that
logic, and if you try to, I’m sure there’s a nice camp somewhere you can be
sent until you see things the right way.

4 comments:

Your opening was a good one. It immediately got my attention. I agree with much of what you say, however, you lost me on some of what you said. If we as a people do not unite together and stop being so passive in society, we may end up with more "Hitlers" with much deadlier means. We need to stop accepting all the wrongs in life and start helping by doing more.